Responding to my End Times theory, Brian commented “Can we show that one reality is better than another? I hope so!” I’ve been struggling on and off with this question of what makes one reality “better” than another for at least six years. In that rant (itself a follow-up to these thoughts on morality), I […]
Category: politics
Big Brother is Us
I received an action alert from MoveOn today about fighting the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court: Right now we urgently need more information, and we need your help to get it. In the next few hours the Internet will fill with facts, anecdotes and rumors about Harriet Miers. We need your help […]
Solving hurricanes
As the second hurricane in a month is building up power over the overheated Gulf of Mexico, this is my projection as to what President Bush may be thinking: Well, the problem is that the water in the Gulf is too warm. Too warm. Too warm. Hrm. How do we cool water that is too […]
Emotional Speech Exhaustion
[Oops, wrote this over the weekend and meant to post it last night, but forgot, so I’m doing it now] Brad wrote a post two months ago about free speech and free will. And I liked it a lot. I even commented on it. But I wanted to write it up in my own blog […]
Enlightened Selfishness
Picking up on yesterday’s anarchy post, I was thinking about what it takes for anarchy (or even capitalism) to work as a society. I was talking with some other friends last week about the concept of enlightened selfishness, and I think that is one of the keys. What do I mean by enlightened selfishness? It’s […]
Anarchy is Progress!
A friend of mine pointed me at this email, where a reader of Gizmodo criticizes them for having the temerity to insult the Queen of England. In particular, he says: Some institutions in the world, like the church, must stay intact or it causes a breakdown in civilization. There must be a counterbalance that allows […]
Filtered world views
This is the next post in the Latour series so feel free to skip it if you found the other posts boring. I’d actually started writing this post several weeks ago, when I noticed that while I was reading Latour, certain points resonated very strongly with me, and others I was just kind of skimming […]
Politics of Nature part 3
Okay, I said yesterday that part 2 would end my book review, but I lied. There is one crucial aspect of Latour’s book that I didn’t cover yet. To review, part 1 essentially covered chapters 1 and 2, part 2 covered chapters 3 and 4, and today we’ll cover chapter 5, which covers how to […]
Politics of Nature part 2
Continuing yesterday’s summary of Politics of Nature, by Bruno Latour. Today’s subject: Latour’s proposal for a “Constitution” on how we construct reality in a democratic fashion via due process, one that cuts across science and politics and multiculturalists and facts and values. I’m going to sketch out the process first, and then go back and […]
Predicting 2008
A friend of mine commented that Jeb Bush was a strange emissary to send to southeast Asia to oversee disaster relief. My friend also wondered why Colin Powell was along, given that he left the administration recently. My immediate thought was that the Republicans were giving Jeb a higher profile statesmanlike image to boost his […]
